School Desegregation

(redirected from School Desegregation After Brown)

School Desegregation

The attempt to end the practice of separating children of different races into distinct public schools.

Beginning with the landmark Supreme Court case of brown v. board of education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954), the United States' legal system has sought to address the problem of racial Segregation, or separation, in public schools. In Brown, a unanimous Supreme Court found that segregating children of different races in distinct schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees that "[n]o state shall … deny to any person … the Equal Protection of the laws" (§ 1). In writing the Court's opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren stressed the crucial role education plays in socializing children, and he maintained that racial segregation "generates a feeling of inferiority" in children that will limit their opportunities in life. A related decision, Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294, 75 S. Ct. 753, 99 L. Ed. 1083 (1955), (Brown II), empowered lower courts to supervise desegregation in local school districts and held that desegregation must proceed "with all deliberate speed."

A number of Supreme Court decisions in the decades since Brown have further defined the constitutional claims regarding desegregation first set forth in Brown. In many cases, these decisions have resulted in court-imposed desegregation plans, sometimes involving controversial provisions for busing students to schools outside their immediate neighborhood. Despite such judicial actions, desegregation in the United States achieved mixed success. Although many more children attend school with children of other races now than in 1954, in numerous cities, racial segregation in education remains as high as ever. Faced with the challenges of shifting populations, segregated housing patterns, impatient courts, and the stubborn persistence of racism, comprehensive school desegregation—long a hoped-for remedy to past discrimination against African Americans—remains an elusive goal.

1954–1970: School Desegregation After Brown

Brown and Brown II inspired a great deal of hope that the races would soon be joined in public schools and that the United States would take a giant step toward healing the racial animosities of its past. Thurgood Marshall, an African American who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Legal Defense Fund in its challenge to school segregation in Brown and later became a justice of the Supreme Court, predicted that after Brown, schools would be completely desegregated within six months.

Marshall's statement proved to be wildly optimistic. By 1964, ten years after Brown, a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) study indicated that only 2.4 percent of African Americans in the South were attending largely white schools. Such statistics indicated that Brown had led to only token Integration. By the mid-1960s, many observers felt that the Supreme Court, and the United States as a whole, had lost an opportunity to more quickly create a desegregated society. De facto segregation (segregation in fact or actuality)—as opposed to de jure segregation (segregation by law)—remained a stubborn reality, and racism remained its leading cause. Whites who did not want their children attending school with children of another race found many ways to avoid desegregation, from gerrymandering school boundaries (adjusting school boundaries to their advantage) to manipulating school transportation and construction policies. And in a phenomenon dubbed white flight, many transferred their children to private schools or simply moved to suburbs where few, if any, nonwhites lived.

Congress joined the Supreme Court in its efforts to assist desegregation, by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (28 U.S.C.A. § 1447, 42 U.S.C.A. §§ 1971, 1975a to 1975d, 2000a to 2000h-6). Among its many features, the act authorized HEW to create specific guidelines with which to measure the progress of school desegregation. In 1966, for example, these guidelines called for specific levels of integration: 16 to 18 percent of African–American children in all school districts must be attending predominantly white schools. The act also allowed HEW to cut off federal funding to school districts that did not meet integration guidelines. However, this punishment proved difficult to use as a means of enforcement.

In the mid-1960s, a judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, John Minor Wisdom, issued a number of influential opinions that strengthened the cause of racial integration of schools. Wisdom's rulings established that it was not enough simply to end segregation; instead, school districts must actively implement desegregation. In one of these cases, United States v. Jefferson Board of Education, 372 F.2d 836 (5th Cir. 1966), he wrote, "[T]he only adequate redress for a previously overt system-wide policy of segregation directed against Negroes as a collective entity is a system-wide policy of integration." Wisdom's ruling also detailed measures that the school district must take toward the goal of integration, including deciding how children were to be informed of the schools available to them for attendance, where new schools must be constructed, where transportation routes must run, and how faculty and staff were to be hired and assigned.

In 1968, the Supreme Court again addressed the issue of school desegregation, in Green v. County School Board, 391 U.S. 430, 88 S. Ct. 1689, 20 L. Ed. 2d 716, which dealt with the schools of New Kent County, a rural area in eastern Virginia. In its opinion, the Court acknowledged that the integration guidelines set forth in Brown II had not produced adequate results. School districts such as those of New Kent County—where in 1967, 85 percent of black children still attended an all-black school—had avoided meaningful integration. It was not enough, the Court argued, to simply end segregation and allow a "freedom-of-choice" plan—by which African–American children supposedly had the freedom to attend predominantly white schools—to be the only means of combining the races in an educational setting. In comments during Court hearings on the case, Chief Justice Warren noted that though the "fence" of outright segregation had been taken down, socially constructed "booby traps" still prevented most children from attending integrated schools.

Green also introduced two concepts—dual school systems and unitary school systems—that remain a part of the school desegregation debate. A dual school system is a segregated school system. In other words, it consists of separate segments—one black, the other white— existing side by side but with widely different educational conditions and outcomes. The Court in Green identified six indicators of a dual system: racial separation of students, faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities, and facilities. A unitary school system, on the other hand, is racially integrated at every level. In a later ruling, Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 19, 90 S. Ct. 29, 24 L. Ed. 2d 19 (1969), the Court described a unitary system as one "within which no person is to be effectively excluded from any school because of race or color."

Even more important, in its opinion in Green, the Court held that New Kent County would be expected to immediately begin remedying the lasting effects of segregation. "The burden on a school board today," the Court said, "is to come forward with a plan that promises realistically to work, and promises realistically to work now" (Green). Thus, the Court abandoned its previous position that school desegregation must proceed "with all deliberate speed" in favor of a call for immediate and prompt action.

The Court also held that the Fourteenth Amendment required action to remedy past racial discrimination—or what has come to be called Affirmative Action. It found an "affirmative duty to take whatever steps might be necessary to convert to a unitary system in which racial discrimination would be eliminated root and branch" (Green). Moreover, school boards would have to provide meaningful statistical evidence that their school district was moving toward the goal of integration.

In a footnote to its opinion, the Court advanced suggestions for achieving school desegregation, including combining all children in a particular age range, white and black, into the same building.

Green and subsequent judicial decisions through 1970 caused a remarkable change in school desegregation. By 1971, HEW statistics indicated that the South had become the most racially integrated region in the United States. HEW estimated that 44 percent of African– American students attended majority white schools in the South, as opposed to 28 percent in the North and West. In many communities, however, these changes resulted in white flight. In Mississippi, for example, white public school enrollment dropped between 25 and 100 percent in the 30 school districts with the highest black enrollment.

The 1970s: Swann and Busing

In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1, 91 S. Ct. 1267, 28 L. Ed. 2d 554 (1971), the focus of school desegregation shifted from largely rural school districts to urban ones, a change of scene that offered new challenges to desegregation. In the rural South before the Brown decision, blacks and whites lived largely in the same communities or areas, and requiring that their children attend the same neighborhood schools could resolve segregation. In urban settings, however, blacks and whites lived in different neighborhoods, so combining the two races in the same schools meant transporting children, usually by bus, to institutions that were often far from their homes.

In Swann, the Court took the final step toward making busing a part of school desegregation plans, by giving the lower courts power to impose it as a means for achieving integration. Swann involved the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, in North Carolina, a district in which African Americans made up 29 percent of the student body. After the Supreme Court's decision in Green, a federal district judge ruled that the school district had not achieved adequate levels of integration: 14,000 of the 24,000 African–American students still attended schools that were all black, and most of the 24,000 did not have any white teachers. The judge called for the adoption of a desegregation plan that involved busing 13,300 additional children at an initial start-up cost of over $1 million.

The Busing Debate

Busing is a plan for promoting school desegregation, by which minority students are transported to largely white schools and white students are brought to largely minority schools. It is intended to safeguard the Civil Rights of students and to provide equal opportunity in public education. Busing is also an example of affirmative action—that is, the attempt to undo or compensate for the effects of past discrimination. Such action is sometimes called compensatory justice.

Busing was first enacted as part of school desegregation programs in response to federal court decisions establishing that racial Segregation of public schools violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In Green v. County School Board, 391 U.S. 430, 88 S. Ct. 1689, 20 L. Ed. 2d 716 (1968), and swann v. charlotte-mecklenburg board of education, 402 U.S. 1, 91 S. Ct. 1267, 28 L. Ed. 2d 554 (1971), the Supreme Court established that federal courts could require school districts to implement busing programs as a means of achieving racial Integration of public schools.

However, busing was nothing new in U.S. education. Even before these decisions, nearly 40 percent of the nation's schoolchildren were bused to school. And before 1954, when the Court declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional in brown v. board of education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873, children were often bused to segregated schools that were beyond walking distance from their homes.

With the Supreme Court decisions in Green and Swann, busing became one of the most controversial topics in U.S. law and politics, particularly in the 1970s. Although the zeal for busing as a remedy for past racial injustice had waned greatly by the 1990s, busing remained a feature—if many times a limited one—of most school desegregation programs and continued to inspire heated debate.

Those who are in favor of busing claim, as did the Supreme Court in Green and Swann, that racial integration in and of itself is a worthy social goal and that busing is an effective means of achieving that goal in public education. Supporters point to the harmful legacy of segregation in education. Before Brown, African-American children were schooled in separate facilities that were usually inferior to the facilities used by whites, despite official claims that they were equal. Such segregation worked to keep African Americans at a disadvantage in relation to whites. It instilled feelings of inferiority in African–American children and seriously diminished their educational achievement and opportunities.

Supporters of busing also often claim that de facto (actual) segregation exists even decades after the Civil Rights Movement and the striking down of racial segregation laws, which occurred in the 1960s. A largely white, wealthy upper class and a largely minority, poor under-class, they argue, are transported, employed, housed, and educated in different settings. Often wealthy people live in the suburbs, and the poor live in the cities. Growing up in their separate neighborhoods, children from higher socioeconomic levels thus have many advantages that poorer children do not: more space at home, better nutrition and health care, greater cultural and intellectual stimulation, and friends and acquaintances with higher social status providing better job and career prospects. Some even compare the isolation of impoverished minorities in the United States' inner cities with that of impoverished blacks under South Africa's former apartheid system.

Advocates of desegregation through busing assert that these existing inequalities must not become greater and that desegregation in education will go a long way toward ending them and creating a more just society. They also point out that U.S. education has historically worked to ensure a society in which class hierarchy is minimized and social mobility—both upward and downward—is maximized. Busing, they argue, will therefore help avoid the creation of a permanent underclass in the United States.

Supporters of busing also maintain that it is an affordable way to achieve school desegregation. While admitting that the initial start-up costs of a busing program can be large, they point to statistics that indicate the operating costs of compulsory busing are generally less than five percent of a school district's entire budget.

Those who oppose busing make a variety of different points against it, although they do not necessarily oppose integration itself. Opponents claim that busing serves as a distraction from more important educational goals such as quality of instruction. Busing, they hold, too easily becomes a case of form over substance, in which the form of racial integration of education becomes of greater value than the substance of what is actually taught in schools. Critics of busing would rather focus on the environment in a school and in its classrooms than on achieving a particular number of each race in a school. Justice lewis f. powell jr. echoed these sentiments in an opinion to a school desegregation case, Keyes v. Denver School District, 413 U.S. 189, 93 S. Ct. 2686, 37 L. Ed. 2d 548 (1973). In Keyes, he wrote that in an era of declining student achievement, it is wrong to turn the attention of communities "from the paramount goal of quality in education to a perennially divisive debate over who is to be transported where."

Critics also claim that busing causes white flight—where whites move their children from integrated public schools to private and suburban schools that are largely white—which results in an even greater disparity between white and black, rich and poor. According to this scenario, busing only exacerbates the current situation, making public schools and cities even more the exclusive province of the poor.

Some noted experts on the issue of busing have concluded that although they favor a society that is racially integrated, the social costs of busing and the resulting white flight are too high. Others have sought a middle ground on the issue by arguing that judges should choose carefully the districts in which they decide to implement busing. For example, they claim that white flight is more likely to occur in communities and schools where whites form a small minority, and that as a result, busing has higher social costs in such districts.

Another prominent complaint in the anti-busing opinion is that court-ordered busing programs represent an abuse of judicial power. According to this view, busing is an example of undesirable judicial activism. The large-scale social changes caused by transporting thousands of children many miles each day should be imposed only by an elected body of representatives such as a state legislature or Congress. Moreover, adherents of this view argue that supervising school desegregation programs only bogs down the courts and takes time away from other pressing legal matters.

Critics of busing also point out that many times, the same court that requires busing does not provide guidance as to funding it, thereby creating financial headaches for school districts. Related to this issue is the claim that busing is too costly, especially when school districts are forced to purchase new buses in order to start a busing program. In financially strapped school districts, spending on busing sometimes takes away funding for other educational priorities.

Some of those who oppose busing favor racial desegregation but do not view busing as a good way to achieve that goal. Instead, they support a gradualist approach to social reform. According to the gradualist view, it will take generations to achieve the goal of racial desegregation in education and in society as a whole. Busing only interferes with the overall goal of integration, because of the sudden and disruptive changes—including white flight—that it imposes on society.

Others oppose busing on the ground that neighborhood schools are the best way to educate children. In this camp are both those in favor of racial integration in education and those against it. Neighborhood schools, it is argued, allow parents to have a greater influence on their child's education by making it easier, for example, to visit the school and speak with a teacher. Such schools also give children a sense of identity and instill pride in their community. Busing children to a school across town, they argue, will not inspire pride in their school. Advocates of neighborhood schools also point to statistics that indicate that bused students are more alienated from their school and thus experience greater problems, including poorer academic performance and increased delinquency.

An even more fundamental question related to busing is whether racial integration is in itself a valuable goal for public schools. Those who take opposite sides on this question marshal different sociological evidence. In the 1950s and 1960s the Supreme Court was influenced by the "contact" theory of racial integration. According to this theory, the better one knows those of another race, the more one is able to get along with them. Sociologists reasoned, therefore, that integrated schools would increase understanding between the races and lower racial tensions.

In the same years, many studies claimed to show that racial integration would boost the self-esteem, academic achievement, and ultimately opportunities and choices of members of minorities. For example, a well-known report issued by sociologist James S. Coleman in 1966, Equality of Educational Opportunity, concluded that minority children improve their academic performance when they attend classes where middle-class white pupils are the majority. Coleman's report also claimed that the most important indicator of the academic performance of minority and lower-class students is the educational level of their classmates. The report was seized upon by many as a reason to institute court-imposed busing plans for school districts.

By the 1970s and later, other sociologists challenged the liberal theories that school desegregation would lead to greater racial harmony and improved academic performance by African Americans. Coleman, too, became more skeptical about busing and argued that voluntary programs were more effective than government-imposed plans in achieving school desegregation. Others went so far as to claim that integration only increases hostility and tensions between the races. African–American students who are bused, they argued, experience a decline in their educational achievement in school. Some studies have in fact shown that students who are bused grow more rather than less hostile toward the other race or races. In addition, some studies have indicated that in many schools where the desired percentages of races have been achieved through busing, students interact largely with those of their own race and thus segregation within the school prevents true desegregation.

By 2003 the anti-busing viewpoint appeared to have prevailed. During the 1990s federal courts released many school districts from supervision by declaring these districts free of the taint of state-imposed segregation. The 1999 release of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district from court supervision was a symbolic moment, marking the end of an almost 30 year experiment in which the courts used busing to attempt the desegregation of public schools. That same year the Boston public schools, which had endured years of conflict over busing, ended race-based admissions and its busing program. Even cities such as Seattle, which voluntarily adopted a busing program in the 1970s, abandoned the practice in 1999.

Further readings

Cross-references

The Supreme Court upheld the district court's plans. Just as in Brown II, it gave school authorities and district judges primary responsibility for school desegregation. This time, however, the Court provided more guidance. To create desegregated schools, it encouraged faculty reassignment; the redrawing of school attendance zones; and an optional, publicly funded transfer program for minority students. Most important, the Court recommended mandatory busing to achieve desegregation. It did note that busing could be excessive when it involved especially great distances. It also hinted at an end to court-imposed desegregation plans, saying, "Neither school authorities nor district courts are constitutionally required to make year-by-year adjustments of the racial composition of student bodies" (Brown II). In Court decisions decades later, these words would be cited in support of ending court-supervised school desegregation programs.

As a result of Swann, throughout the 1970s, courts ordered busing to achieve desegregation in many city school districts, including Boston, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Los Angeles. However, Swann was one of the last desegregation opinions in which all nine justices were in complete agreement. The Court's unanimity on the issue of school desegregation, which had been the rule in every decision since Brown, broke down in the next major case, Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717, 94 S. Ct. 3112, 41 L. Ed. 2d 1069 (1974).

Milliken shifted the scene of school desegregation from the South to the North—specifically, to Detroit. In Milliken, the Supreme Court addressed the issue of whether courts could bus suburban pupils to desegregate inner-city schools. The case dealt with federal district judge Stephen Roth's decision to join the Detroit School District with 53 of the city's 85 outlying suburbs in a desegregation decree. The proposed plan would have created a metropolitan school district with 780,000 students, of which 310,000 would be bused daily to achieve desegregation goals. The shocked white community, much like others in the South, and its elected representatives denounced the plan.

Detroit reflected the situation of many U.S. cities. Although African Americans made up only 23 percent of the city's population in 1970, they constituted 61 percent of its school-age population. Whites were underrepresented in the inner-city public schools for various reasons. Young white married couples, who constituted the demographic group most likely to have school-age children, were also the most likely to move to the suburbs. The whites who did live in the cities tended to be older people, singles, and childless couples. Urban whites who did have school-age children often sent them to private schools.

Such a situation caused Judge Roth to ask the question, "How do you desegregate a black city, or a black school system?" (Milliken). Busing within city limits alone would still leave many schools 75 to 90 percent black. The only solution was one that took into consideration the entire metropolitan area of Detroit by joining the city school district with the surrounding suburban school districts.

In support of this position, Judge Roth argued that a variety of causes had led to the concentration of blacks in ghettos. Governments, he wrote in his opinion, "at all levels, federal, state and local, have combined, with … private organizations, such as loaning institutions and real estate associations and brokerage firms, to establish … residential segregation throughout the Detroit metropolitan area" (Bradley). Residential segregation had resulted from a whole variety of types of discrimination that caused African Americans and members of other minorities to live in segregated neighborhoods and, as a result, attend segregated schools. Thus, Roth framed his metropolitan school desegregation plan as a remedy for past discriminatory conduct.

Judge Roth's plan promised to promote class as well as racial interaction, complicating still further the issue of desegregation. Mixing of the different classes of U.S. society became as much a goal of desegregation decrees as did mixing of different races. Such a plan, its proponents argued, might also remedy the funding inequities between different school districts and even end white flight.

In 1974, by a vote of 5–4, the Supreme Court ruled in Milliken that Judge Roth had wrongly included the suburbs with the city in his desegregation decree. The district court's plan, the Court held, could only be justified if de jure segregation existed in outlying suburbs; remedies to past discriminatory conduct must be limited to Detroit, since it was the only district that had such policies. Disagreeing with Roth, the Court also held that state housing practices were not relevant to the case. Writing the Court's opinion, Chief Justice warren e. burger argued for local control of school districts, over court control: "No single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of schools; local autonomy has long been thought essential both to the maintenance of community concern and support for public schools and to the quality of the educational process."

Many saw the Milliken decision as the first Supreme Court defeat for the cause of school desegregation. Some, including Justice Marshall, the first African American to sit on the Court, interpreted Milliken as an abandonment of the cause of racial justice. "Today's holding, …" Marshall wrote in his dissenting opinion, "is more a reflection of a perceived public mood that we have gone far enough in enforcing the Constitution's guarantee of equal justice than it is the product of neutral principles of law." Supporters of the decision, on the other hand, pointed to the myriad potential problems a plan like Roth's might impose, including greater bureaucratic red tape, more white flight, and even greater racial tensions.

The 1980s and After

In the 1980s, the attitude of the public and of the courts toward activist school desegregation programs—and toward other forms of affirmative action, for that matter—became more skeptical and sometimes even hostile. Courts began to require that busing, for example, be used as a remedy only in school districts where there had been "deliberate" or "intentional" segregation. A large busing program that had been begun in Los Angeles in 1978 was ended in 1981 through a statewide Referendum that banned compulsory busing except in districts where there had been deliberate segregation. By the late 1980s and 1990s, the Supreme Court, now having the influence of more conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents ronald reagan and george h. w. bush, established that court-ordered desegregation decrees, including busing plans, could end short of specific statistical goals of integration when everything "practicable" had been done to eliminate the vestiges of past discrimination.

Two court decisions in the early 1990s—Board of Education v. Dowell, 498 U.S. 237, 111 S. Ct. 630, 112 L. Ed. 2d 715 (1991), which dealt with the Oklahoma City School District, and Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S. 467, 112 S. Ct. 1430, 118 L. Ed. 2d 108 (1992), which covered the schools of DeKalb County, Georgia—addressed the manner in which court supervision of school districts and their desegregation programs might end. In Freeman, the Court identified three factors that may be used in such determinations: (1) whether the school system has complied with the desegregation decree's provisions, (2) whether continued judicial control is necessary or practicable to achieve compliance with any aspect of the decree, and (3) whether the school system has demonstrated to the once-disfavored race its Good Faith commitment to the whole of the decree. Ultimately, the school system must be held to have engaged in a good faith effort to comply with any judicially supervised desegregation program, and to have eliminated to the extent practicable any vestiges of discrimination. Freeman also established that courts may end desegregation decrees in incremental stages, gradually returning administrative functions and decisions to local authorities.

In another case—Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U.S. 70, 115 S. Ct. 2038, 132 L. Ed. 2d 63 (1995), which dealt with the Kansas City (Missouri) School District—the Court stopped just short of ending judicial supervision of desegregation programs. However, the decision did strike down two requirements imposed by a district court on the state of Missouri, declaring them outside that court's authority. Those two requirements would have attempted to improve the "desegregative attractiveness"—in this case, the ability to attract white students from the suburban school districts—of the school district by requiring the state to fund salary increases for all staff in the school district, as well as "quality education" programs, including magnet schools. Such "interdistrict" remedies, the Court held, are beyond the scope of the district court. The Court, citing Milliken, disagreed with the contention that white flight justifies an interdistrict remedy to segregation. The Court also rejected student test scores as evidence for determining whether a school district has adequately responded to judicial desegregation decrees.

Those who supported these decisions saw them as returning to local authorities their proper control over their schools. They also saw these decisions as guiding the courts back to a more proper and limited social role. The courts, they argued, should not be engaged in programs of "social engineering." Others, both black and white, simply abandoned desegregation as a goal and instead focused on improving neighborhood schools, even when those schools remain largely segregated.

Critics of these decisions have seen them as a step backward for the Civil Rights of minorities in the United States. Such decisions, they argued, merely perpetuated racism by returning school districts to those who often do not share the goal of creating racially integrated public schools. Others have argued that the changing pattern in the judicial response to desegregation has been caused by the legal system's exhaustion and impatience in the face of complex and protracted desegregation plans. Accustomed to seeing more rapid results, district courts, according to this argument, have been eager to return the control of school districts to local authorities.

Others have argued that the Supreme Court decisions on school desegregation have ignored the effect of discriminatory housing patterns. They have maintained that without a change in segregated housing patterns, desegregation, whether in schools or in the larger society, cannot be achieved. They claim that by ignoring housing as an issue, the Supreme Court enabled white America to escape its responsibilities in creating the urban ghetto.

Still others have argued that school desegregation can yet be achieved through the court system, maintaining that social change of the kind required for true desegregation will take many years. In the mid-1990s, organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union began to focus on making the case for school desegregation on the state rather than federal level. Some state constitutions, they pointed out, contain language more conducive to their cause. Connecticut's constitution, for example, declares that no person "shall … be subjected to segregation" (Conn. Const. art. 1, § 20), and Minnesota's requires that all students be given an adequate education. Lawsuits based on state constitutions have met with mixed success, prevailing in Connecticut but failing in Minnesota.

By 2003 most school districts had been released from federal court supervision. In addition, school districts had abandoned busing to achieve desegregation. The Minneapolis, Minnesota school district, which has a predominantly non-white student population, dropped busing in the late 1990s, opting instead to emphasize strong neighborhood schools. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, which was at the center of the school busing controversy, ended its busing program after a federal judge ended supervision in 1999. School desegregation has not been the panacea that it was claimed to be in the heady days of Brown. Though significant success in integration has been achieved, as of 2003 there was little evidence that comprehensive school desegregation would come any time soon.

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